The Embattled Lyric

Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology

By Nathaniel Tarn

2007

First Published

4.31

Average Rating

286

Number of Pages

8H43M

Audio Length

This book has two main subjects which are the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the “archaic,” studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author’s successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

Avg Rating

4.31

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

46%

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1 STARS

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Author

Nathaniel Tarn

Author · 6 books

Nathaniel Tarn is an American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator. Tarn was educated at Clifton College, UK and graduated in history and English from King's College, Cambridge. He returned to Paris and, after some journalism and radio work, discovered anthropology at the Musée de l’Homme, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Collège de France. A Fulbright a grant took him to Yale and the University of Chicago where Robert Redfield sent him to Guatemala for his doctoral fieldwork (1951-2) at the University of Chicago. He completed this work as a graduate student at the London School of Economics (1953-8). Tarn was a professor at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. He emigrated to the United States in 1970 and taught at American universities.